Seeing the Visual: A Literature Review on Why and How Policy Scholars Would Do Well to Study Influential Visualizations

Visualizations are important for policy debates. In a single image, visuals convey information, values, and emotions . Think of the shocking image of Alan Kurdi’s drowning and the abrupt shift in immigration policy debates in Europe. Visualizations influence policy and politics, but how? This article presents a detailed and analytic overview of the state-of-the-art research on visualizations from the policy and political sciences and suggests a research agenda. We identified five explanatory roles for how visualizations influence policy and policy debates as: 1) sense-making devices for interpreting complex information; 2) emotional triggers to strategically manipulate the viewers’ sentiments for political gains; 3) objects of political meaning making; 4) icons that convey social and cultural norms; and 5) portrayals of the underlying values that matter when representing situations in society. We applied our findings to a visualization of the controversial gene-editing technology CRISPR-Cas applied to food. We claim that these five roles need to be combined to better understand how visualizations are influential over time and for different policy actors. We argue for studying visualizations as boundary objects whose meaning is negotiated between (groups of) policy actors and that can change over time.